LONDON — Tom Hayes, one of two former UBS AG traders charged by U.S. prosecutors, is portrayed by American regulators as the kingpin of a three-year campaign that succeeded in manipulating global interest rates.

Hayes, 33, was charged with wire fraud and price-fixing, the Department of Justice said in a criminal complaint unsealed Wednesday. The trader and Roger Darin, a former short-term interest-rates trader at UBS whose responsibilities included the firm’s yen Libor quotes, were also charged with conspiracy. Yen Libor reflects how much banks charge each other for loans in the Japanese currency.

Hayes colluded with brokers, counterparts at other firms and his colleagues to manipulate the rate, the Justice Department said. Between 2006 and 2009, a UBS trader made at least 800 requests to the firm’s yen Libor rate-setters, about 100 to traders at other banks, and 1,200 to interdealer brokers, according to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which didn’t identify Hayes by name.

“Many UBS yen derivatives traders and managers were involved in the manipulative conduct and made requests to serve their own trading positions’ interests,” the CFTC said. “But the volume of unlawful requests submitted by one particular senior yen derivatives trader in Tokyo dwarfed them all.”

On Wednesday, UBS was fined $1.5 billion by U.S., British and Swiss regulators for trying to rig Libor, which is derived by asking banks how much it would cost to borrow from each other in different rates and currencies. The penalty amounted to about a third of the Zurich-based lender’s net income for 2011 and three times more than the $472 million Barclays PLC agreed to pay in June.

Banks’ manipulation of interest rates has spawned probes by half a dozen agencies on three continents in what has become the industry’s biggest and longest-running scandal. More than $300 trillion of loans, mortgages, financial products and contracts are linked to Libor.

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